terra bravura

Terra Bravura, began as short text messages sent to David Musgrave from the desert on the way to Broken Hill. He later described their poetic form thus: "The poems are terrific. Vox clamantis in desierto. The lines are dense and staccato, with a kind of pinpoint-accurate mouthfulness of sound – hard to describe, but it seems to me that the rhythm is what makes it work so distinctively. There are words that leap out at you –

‘the eagle, canopic on tar,

atop kangaroo smear,

thrown furred corsets of white bone,

confetti of road crows chroming a black storm’

– this is inventive, musical and harsh, accurate and rich, with a vein of visionary dream, which I like." The landscape of feral goats, idiosyncratic human markers, failed fences, becomes the distorted and detail-selective realm of memory. It was written in 2009, when the poet's father began to lose his memory; it is an exploration of oral tradition, the stuff of generational infamy, the coming, by ship in 1855, to Australia . ‘That sick green sea/carrying/the little stone/to the orange square…